Thoughts on History: Columbus Day

It's Columbus Day in the United States. An explorer, Cristoforo Colombo, appropriated land for a Spanish queen, committing foot, flag and European mindset to the shores of Cuba or Florida (depending on who you believe) or some other southeastern land spit, after having bobbed around in a strange ocean for a few months in a tiny boat with a scurvy crew.

I, the much-distant beneficiary of that land claim, drove in my little car on civilized and well-regulated streets this morning. My car was designed in Germany and assembled in Mexico. I had oatmeal from Ireland, almonds from Spain, coffee from Costa Rica, and wore clothes manufactured in China, Malaysia, and Indonesia. What a world this has become. I can barely imagine living the way he had to. No phones, electricity, freedoms for every citizen, health, long life. He was a notable and bold change agent, intent on discovery and enrichment, making a leap of imagination most people of his day found very frightening.

It's funny we celebrate only one explorer when so many others also contributed to the comforts of our modern day. We don't have Alexander Graham Bell Day or Thomas Edison Day even though they were equal in bravery and imagination to Columbus, overturning stodgy and ordinary thinking in order to answer nagging questions they could not ignore.  We also don't have Florence Nightingale Day, although my profession owes almost everything to her.

So I'm going to call this day Explorer and Inventor Day. I invite you to fill in a name for the person whom you believe most deserves recognition for advancing the human species.  Hats off to all those free thinkers in the past, the present and the future. They might have been or will be nuts who made us or will make us uncomfortable and frightened, but they were immune to criticism and hesitancy, plowing forward at all costs.

I sit here at my keyboard and try to imagine times past, when difficulties and problems were so much different, or the future that will be all but unrecognizable to me here and now. As much as I like to think I can think outside the box, I often don't. It takes a special breed to do that.  So, explorers and imaginers out there, celebrate the day; we have set it aside to memorialize you and a little wild-eyed explorer from Italy who changed the world as each of you can if you follow your hearts.